Uncertainty-Aware Shared Autonomy System with Hierarchical Conservative Skill Inference

Shared autonomy imitation learning, in which robots share workspace with humans for learning, enables correct actions in unvisited states and the effective resolution of compounding errors through expert's corrections. However, it demands continuous human attention and supervision to lead the demonstrations, without considering the risks associated with human judgment errors and delayed interventions. This can potentially lead to high levels of fatigue for the demonstrator and the additional errors. In this work, we propose an uncertainty-aware shared autonomy system that enables the robot to infer conservative task skills considering environmental uncertainties and learning from expert demonstrations and corrections. To enhance generalization and scalability, we introduce a hierarchical structure-based skill uncertainty inference framework operating at more abstract levels. We apply this to robot motion to promote a more stable interaction. Although shared autonomy systems have demonstrated high-level results in recent research and play a critical role, specific system design details have remained elusive. This paper provides a detailed design proposal for a shared autonomy system considering various robot configurations. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate the system's capability to learn operational skills, even in dynamic environments with interference, through pouring and pick-and-place tasks. Our code will be released soon.

Onboard Science Instrument Autonomy for the Detection of Microscopy Biosignatures on the Ocean Worlds Life Surveyor

The quest to find extraterrestrial life is a critical scientific endeavor with civilization-level implications. Icy moons in our solar system are promising targets for exploration because their liquid oceans make them potential habitats for microscopic life. However, the lack of a precise definition of life poses a fundamental challenge to formulating detection strategies. To increase the chances of unambiguous detection, a suite of complementary instruments must sample multiple independent biosignatures (e.g., composition, motility/behavior, and visible structure). Such an instrument suite could generate 10,000x more raw data than is possible to transmit from distant ocean worlds like Enceladus or Europa. To address this bandwidth limitation, Onboard Science Instrument Autonomy (OSIA) is an emerging discipline of flight systems capable of evaluating, summarizing, and prioritizing observational instrument data to maximize science return. We describe two OSIA implementations developed as part of the Ocean Worlds Life Surveyor (OWLS) prototype instrument suite at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The first identifies life-like motion in digital holographic microscopy videos, and the second identifies cellular structure and composition via innate and dye-induced fluorescence. Flight-like requirements and computational constraints were used to lower barriers to infusion, similar to those available on the Mars helicopter, "Ingenuity." We evaluated the OSIA's performance using simulated and laboratory data and conducted a live field test at the hypersaline Mono Lake planetary analog site. Our study demonstrates the potential of OSIA for enabling biosignature detection and provides insights and lessons learned for future mission concepts aimed at exploring the outer solar system.

RobustSwap: A Simple yet Robust Face Swapping Model against Attribute Leakage

Face swapping aims at injecting a source image's identity (i.e., facial features) into a target image, while strictly preserving the target's attributes, which are irrelevant to identity. However, we observed that previous approaches still suffer from source attribute leakage, where the source image's attributes interfere with the target image's. In this paper, we analyze the latent space of StyleGAN and find the adequate combination of the latents geared for face swapping task. Based on the findings, we develop a simple yet robust face swapping model, RobustSwap, which is resistant to the potential source attribute leakage. Moreover, we exploit the coordination of 3DMM's implicit and explicit information as a guidance to incorporate the structure of the source image and the precise pose of the target image. Despite our method solely utilizing an image dataset without identity labels for training, our model has the capability to generate high-fidelity and temporally consistent videos. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we demonstrate that our method shows significant improvements compared with the previous face swapping models in synthesizing both images and videos. Project page is available at https://robustswap.github.io/

Rationale-aware Autonomous Driving Policy utilizing Safety Force Field implemented on CARLA Simulator

Despite the rapid improvement of autonomous driving technology in recent years, automotive manufacturers must resolve liability issues to commercialize autonomous passenger car of SAE J3016 Level 3 or higher. To cope with the product liability law, manufacturers develop autonomous driving systems in compliance with international standards for safety such as ISO 26262 and ISO 21448. Concerning the safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF) requirement in ISO 26262, the driving policy recommends providing an explicit rational basis for maneuver decisions. In this case, mathematical models such as Safety Force Field (SFF) and Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) which have interpretability on decision, may be suitable. In this work, we implement SFF from scratch to substitute the undisclosed NVIDIA's source code and integrate it with CARLA open-source simulator. Using SFF and CARLA, we present a predictor for claimed sets of vehicles, and based on the predictor, propose an integrated driving policy that consistently operates regardless of safety conditions it encounters while passing through dynamic traffic. The policy does not have a separate plan for each condition, but using safety potential, it aims human-like driving blended in with traffic flow.

Morphology-Aware Interactive Keypoint Estimation

Diagnosis based on medical images, such as X-ray images, often involves manual annotation of anatomical keypoints. However, this process involves significant human efforts and can thus be a bottleneck in the diagnostic process. To fully automate this procedure, deep-learning-based methods have been widely proposed and have achieved high performance in detecting keypoints in medical images. However, these methods still have clinical limitations: accuracy cannot be guaranteed for all cases, and it is necessary for doctors to double-check all predictions of models. In response, we propose a novel deep neural network that, given an X-ray image, automatically detects and refines the anatomical keypoints through a user-interactive system in which doctors can fix mispredicted keypoints with fewer clicks than needed during manual revision. Using our own collected data and the publicly available AASCE dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in reducing the annotation costs via extensive quantitative and qualitative results. A demo video of our approach is available on our project webpage.

Style Your Hair: Latent Optimization for Pose-Invariant Hairstyle Transfer via Local-Style-Aware Hair Alignment

Editing hairstyle is unique and challenging due to the complexity and delicacy of hairstyle. Although recent approaches significantly improved the hair details, these models often produce undesirable outputs when a pose of a source image is considerably different from that of a target hair image, limiting their real-world applications. HairFIT, a pose-invariant hairstyle transfer model, alleviates this limitation yet still shows unsatisfactory quality in preserving delicate hair textures. To solve these limitations, we propose a high-performing pose-invariant hairstyle transfer model equipped with latent optimization and a newly presented local-style-matching loss. In the StyleGAN2 latent space, we first explore a pose-aligned latent code of a target hair with the detailed textures preserved based on local style matching. Then, our model inpaints the occlusions of the source considering the aligned target hair and blends both images to produce a final output. The experimental results demonstrate that our model has strengths in transferring a hairstyle under larger pose differences and preserving local hairstyle textures.

HairFIT: Pose-Invariant Hairstyle Transfer via Flow-based Hair Alignment and Semantic-Region-Aware Inpainting

Hairstyle transfer is the task of modifying a source hairstyle to a target one. Although recent hairstyle transfer models can reflect the delicate features of hairstyles, they still have two major limitations. First, the existing methods fail to transfer hairstyles when a source and a target image have different poses (e.g., viewing direction or face size), which is prevalent in the real world. Also, the previous models generate unrealistic images when there is a non-trivial amount of regions in the source image occluded by its original hair. When modifying long hair to short hair, shoulders or backgrounds occluded by the long hair need to be inpainted. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for pose-invariant hairstyle transfer, HairFIT. Our model consists of two stages: 1) flow-based hair alignment and 2) hair synthesis. In the hair alignment stage, we leverage a keypoint-based optical flow estimator to align a target hairstyle with a source pose. Then, we generate a final hairstyle-transferred image in the hair synthesis stage based on Semantic-region-aware Inpainting Mask (SIM) estimator. Our SIM estimator divides the occluded regions in the source image into different semantic regions to reflect their distinct features during the inpainting. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct quantitative and qualitative evaluations using multi-view datasets, K-hairstyle and VoxCeleb. The results indicate that HairFIT achieves a state-of-the-art performance by successfully transferring hairstyles between images of different poses, which has never been achieved before.

Event-guided Deblurring of Unknown Exposure Time Videos

Video deblurring is a highly ill-posed problem due to the loss of motion information in the blur degradation process. Since event cameras can capture apparent motion with a high temporal resolution, several attempts have explored the potential of events for guiding video deblurring. These methods generally assume that the exposure time is the same as the reciprocal of the video frame rate. However,this is not true in real situations, and the exposure time might be unknown and dynamically varies depending on the video shooting environment(e.g., illumination condition). In this paper, we address the event-guided video deblurring assuming dynamically variable unknown exposure time of the frame-based camera. To this end, we first derive a new formulation for event-guided video deblurring by considering the exposure and readout time in the video frame acquisition process. We then propose a novel end-toend learning framework for event-guided video deblurring. In particular, we design a novel Exposure Time-based Event Selection(ETES) module to selectively use event features by estimating the cross-modal correlation between the features from blurred frames and the events. Moreover, we propose a feature fusion module to effectively fuse the selected features from events and blur frames. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets and demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our project code and pretrained models will be available.

K-Hairstyle: A Large-scale Korean hairstyle dataset for virtual hair editing and hairstyle classification

The hair and beauty industry is one of the fastest growing industries. This led to the development of various applications, such as virtual hair dyeing or hairstyle translations, to satisfy the need of the customers. Although there are several public hair datasets available for these applications, they consist of limited number of images with low resolution, which restrict their performance on high-quality hair editing. Therefore, we introduce a novel large-scale Korean hairstyle dataset, K-hairstyle, 256,679 with high-resolution images. In addition, K-hairstyle contains various hair attributes annotated by Korean expert hair stylists and hair segmentation masks. We validate the effectiveness of our dataset by leveraging several applications, such as hairstyle translation, and hair classification and hair retrieval. Furthermore, we will release K-hairstyle soon.